July 3, 2012

A simple word game starts with a word and repeatedly removes a single letter from the word, forming a new word, until there are no letters left. The act of removing a letter is called chopping and the resulting list of words is a chopping chain. For instance:

planet → plane → plan → pan → an → a

Your task is to write a program that takes a word and returns a list of all possible chopping chains that can be formed from the word, given a suitable dictionary. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.